Like any good webmasters, we look at World of Warcraft site stats on a regular basis, and we're always evaluating which aspects of the site people find most useful. Over time, we've identified a few areas that players don't really seem to visit but that still require a bit of effort for us to keep updated each time we release a new content update. For most of these, it's pretty obvious why they don't draw a lot of attention-they tend to focus on things that are simply more compelling to look at inside the game, are a "given," or are already well-served and readily available elsewhere, like on fansites.

Early next week we'll be doing some cleanup and removing the following rarely visited, higher-maintenance sections from the World of Warcraft website:

Here are just a few fansites that provide a wealth of information on the above topics, as well as a whole lot more!

Wowhead

Warcraft Pets

Warcraft Mounts

WoW-Petopia

Doesn't WarcraftPets USE the pets section of the armory to update people's collections? You are going to break their site with this decision. Please don't remove the Pet & Mounts section.
To clarify, this cleanup process shouldn't affect the API fansites and other people use to pull game data.

Flexible Mode Testing - August 9-12

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

We've unlocked the Underhold wing of the Siege of Orgrimmar (Malkorok, Spoils of Pandaria, and Thok the Bloodthirsty) for testing over the weekend, continuing into Monday.

Players with a premade group of between 10 and 25 players can queue using the same interface that you'd use for Dungeons, Scenarios, or LFR. Flexible mode bosses have all the same mechanics as the Normal mode versions, but are otherwise tuned to be more forgiving, and will scale in health and damage output with the number of players in the raid. As you go from a 12-player raid to an 18-player raid, for example, some abilities may affect more targets or hit slightly harder, creatures will have more health, and so forth. Difficulty is almost certainly higher than our final target, but we're probably scaling players down a bit too far for testing right now (ilvl 522 for the Underhold wing).

Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)Combat PvE and Patch 5.4
So, like I mentioned earlier in the thread, we upped the energy cost and damage of Sinister Strike to try to cut back on the spam just slightly. Incidentally, it also helps with the issue of energy capping while both Adrenaline Rush and Shadow Blades are active with the Tier 15 4-piece bonus.

We feel that, with the higher Sinister Strike energy cost in place, we can leave the Tier 15 4-piece as it is. It'll still be a good set bonus, but not quite as good as before, to the point that we don't think it'll have an adverse effect on Tier 16 balance.

Now, I recognize that the general sentiment in this thread seems to disagree with that. Part of why I'm posting this is that I'd like to understand why that is. Keep in mind that this isn't part of balance tuning -- that'll be starting soon, but for the moment we're just trying to get Combat to "feel" right. We're confident that we can make the numbers line up properly with how things are currently functioning on the PTR, but if you disagree, we'd like to know why. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Patch 5.4 PTR - Proving Grounds Bug

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

We’ve discovered a fairly significant bug that explains why we’ve been seeing such drastically different reports on Proving Grounds difficulty. Simply put, PvP gear is not getting its item level downscaled to 463 the way that PvE gear is; it’s staying at item level 522.

We hope to have this fixed ASAP. In the meantime, if you’re testing out Proving Grounds on the PTR, please try to avoid using PvP gear if at all possible.

The Burdens of Shaohao
Blizzard released a six part series that looks at Emperor Shaohao as he progresses toward discovering the truth about his future. Today was the release of the final part. If you want to see more like this in the future, be sure to let Blizzard know you enjoyed it!

"Guys it took us 6 months to purge beta mounts from your armory, we feel we put too much work into it so we're going to kill it off". Exactly what I see when I read the blue post on that, it is nothing less than pure laziness to let fan sites handle even simple armory features rather than possibly making the armory better so more people actually make use of it and it's features. Taking away half of whats there they may as well just kill the armory as a whole, hell fansites can probably do a better job at that too why put any effort into the official website dedicated to the game and let people who want to look on the site for news or guides just walk blindly into the game when not everyone may want to use a fansite or addon for a feature that works perfectly fine on the armory.

For a game as big as WoW is you would think maybe just maybe they would want a high end official site dedicated to it for news/guides/and features. But instead they seem to have thrown in the towel and figure if they can't please everyone on the website they would rather let it burn letting others handle the pieces, can't even rely on it for news anymore outside of patch notes when the vast majority of info is posted on twitter now.

No, although one of his ancestors can be seen in one Jade Forest quest wearing a Caverns of Time tabard, so his family might be somehow related to the Bronze Flight.

Since Pandaria's races thought Pandaria was the only remaining part of the world after the Sundering, I doubt they knew any Bronze Dragons for the last 10,000 years, but his early ancestors might have met one and had the need for historical documentation impressed on them, leading to the creation of the Lorewalkers.

Bloody coins? Great...now pvp guilds will team up and gank every pve player, of the same faction (other faction doesn't exist on our server..)..oh joy!..I should get pvp gear you say? I don't have room in bags for that...ty Blizz for not giving us more bank slots or not giving a crap about expanding void storage "it only would temporarily fix space problem, so screw u guys! -Blizz"

If I buy the censor, use it and get killed by another player I have to wait 10mins before I can use it again to gain bloody coins? Doesn't make sense....It should encourage World PvP but when I always have to wait for 10mins after getting killed there is no way I would farm those 500 coins.

If I buy the censor, use it and get killed by another player I have to wait 10mins before I can use it again to gain bloody coins? Doesn't make sense....It should encourage World PvP but when I always have to wait for 10mins after getting killed there is no way I would farm those 500 coins.

I wouldn't worry about, if you play on high populated server there will be so many people there you will always find someone to kill :P

Bloody coins? Great...now pvp guilds will team up and gank every pve player, of the same faction (other faction doesn't exist on our server..)..oh joy!..I should get pvp gear you say? I don't have room in bags for that...ty Blizz for not giving us more bank slots or not giving a crap about expanding void storage "it only would temporarily fix space problem, so screw u guys! -Blizz"

"you are now hostile to all players, and killing players grants bloody coins"

Don't jump to conclusions, this probably just makes the user flagged, losing 90% hp to lure pve'rs into attacking them. Don't attack them and you'll probably be fine... on a pve server atleast

I don't care about most of the stuff they're planning to remove, but I definitely want them to keep the reputation section of the profiles. I look at people's reputations all the time. What's the point in providing profiles at all if I have to visit a fan site in order to get the whole thing?

Bloody coins? Great...now pvp guilds will team up and gank every pve player, of the same faction (other faction doesn't exist on our server..)..oh joy!..I should get pvp gear you say? I don't have room in bags for that...ty Blizz for not giving us more bank slots or not giving a crap about expanding void storage "it only would temporarily fix space problem, so screw u guys! -Blizz"

If you are on a PvE realm, I can almost guarantee blue flagging yourself will make you safe. If you are bitching about this on a PvP realm, get off the PvP realm. Your poor choice of home is not Blizzard's problem. Either way, shh.